Coordinated Control of Aerial Robotic Manipulators: Theory and Experiments

This brief presents a three-layer control architecture for coordinated control of multiple unmanned aerial vehicle manipulators (UAVMs): the centralized top layer plans the end-effector desired trajectories of each UAVM; the middle layer, local to each vehicle, computes the corresponding motion references; the bottom layer is a low level dynamic motion controller, which tracks the motion references. At second layer, the overall mission is hierarchically decomposed in a set of elementary behaviors, which are combined together, via the null space-based behavioral approach, into more complex compound behaviors. For each UAVM, the suitable compound behavior to be executed is selected by a supervisor. The proposed framework has been tested through an experimental campaign.